Giving Wall Street $800 Billion in taxpayer’s money — over $2000 for every man, woman and child in America — was supposed to free up credit markets and stabilize the economy, right? Yeah, right!

Perhaps the most shocking political episode in my lifetime has been the completely cynical and corrupt surrender of the Democratically-controlled Congress to the Wall Street speculators (aka, thieves), whose almost unbelievably reckless policies brought this gigantic mess upon us. And the punchline of this sick joke is that this criminal act of base thievery has not brought us economic security as advertised, but utter chaos. An entire country, Iceland, is on the verge of going under! From Britain to Australia, all is turmoil, confusion, FEAR. And everyone is saying or thinking: this can’t go on, the market’s going to bottom out soon… isn’t it?

I’m convinced that this has happened because the Left doesn’t exist in America as a political force. Progressive people meeting, talking, demonstrating, writing blogs (like this one)… all that means nothing. All the talk and good intentions of good people can be cancelled literally at the stroke of Bush’s pen, or at the whim of the utterly cynical Nancy Pelosi, whose only thought is not, “How can we public servants help the people?” but “How can we political hacks avoid damage and gain power?” The only reason the bailout took a week to get through Congress was because of the resistance of wingnut Ayn Rand Republicans! The Democratic leadership were completely okay with giving away the people’s money to their buddies in the financial services industry. The Party that refused to impeach the sociopath George Bush and the truly evil Dick Cheney, ostensibly on the grounds that they were lame ducks and couldn’t do any more harm, have now allowed those two criminals to start one last war: the war against the American taxpayer!

Have Bush/Pelosi gone too far? Will the American people stand for this? I was coming home on the subway tonight and all I saw around me were people napping, reading bad newspapers, nodding out… oblivious. Yet the events of the past few weeks might ultimately cause more misery — more starvation, more homelessness, more hopelessness — than America has seen since the Great Depression.

Who wins the election almost doesn’t matter. (Yes, McCain/Palin might attack Iran, and that does matter.) President Obama is not going to pull us out of this mess. (Somebody has rightly written that, if Barack wins, his new slogan might well be, “No, we can’t,” as in “no, we can’t have any more social services because there’s no more money.”) President McCain definitely won’t pull us out of it. Only We the People can pull us out of this.

If Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party gets 5% of the national vote, that would at least be a beginning, because it would raise the Greens to major party status and give Progressives a voice in government. But whether McKinney succeeds or not, it’s up to the people to get mad and fight back, by doing direct action, by organizing strikes, by never letting our lying, traitorous “representatives” off the hook. As Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young once sang, “We’re finally on our own.”

We all know the old dance: it’s a very ancient and corrupt American custom. In an election year, two candidates of the same mainstream party bitterly contest the primaries. Each tries to make the case that to vote for the other guy or gal would be tantamount to destroying the country. To attain the Holy Grail of the party’s nomination, each candidate puts her/his opponent through a process seemingly designed not only to make him or her lose, but to sully that candidate’s professional and personal reputation beyond repair. And when the dust settles and one candidate emerges victorious, the defeated candidate suddenly forgets that the opponent is Evil Incarnate and for the sake of something called Party Unity casts aside all pretense of consistency, integrity and self-respect, shifting the axis of evil to the standard bearer of the other political party and embracing the new nominee and former enemy as a long lost buddy, with whom he/she has never had any ideological differences worth talking about (this last part, sadly, is almost always true).

But one major party candidate this year refused to perform this insane dance. Texas Congressman Ron Paul fought hard against John McCain during the Republican primaries, disagreed with him on practically every issue, and was ultimately buried by the McCain juggernaut. But he refused to play the game. He was much too principled, too committed to his core beliefs — of which McCain is the very antithesis — to compromise. So when the call came from his fellow Texan, Phil Gramm (by the way, isn’t Gramm not supposed to be working for the McCain campaign anymore?), with the message, “You need to endorse John McCain,” Ron Paul politely but firmly said No.

As the good doctor later described it, the demand was not quite as bullying as it may sound. Knowing well his colleague’s stubbornness, Gramm tried to make the argument in terms of his, Paul’s, self-interest. McCain, Gramm claimed, was going to cut taxes more than Obama, so logically the Republican candidate would do “less harm” than the Democratic one. But the congressman knew that to cave in now to GOP pressure would be to betray everything he’d worked and voted for in his career. Besides, as he would later remark, “I don’t like the idea of getting two or three million people angry at me.” The decision was not a difficult one.

But his next decision may well have been. Instead of fading into the night as the glare of the media spotlight moved on to McBama, Dr. Paul chose to be a beacon of true democracy. No longer a candidate himself, Paul called a press conference at the National Press Club on September 10th to bring attention to third-party candidates and thus shine a light not only on all the crucial issues that the two frontrunners refuse to tackle, but on the extent to which our democracy itself has been snuffed out by the single corporate party with two heads and its media lapdogs.

He invited to the press conference Independent candidate Ralph Nader, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, Libertarian candidate Bob Barr (who for reasons of his own declined to appear) and my own candidate, Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. Amazingly, the three politicians who showed up and Dr. Paul — despite their numerous and strong ideological differences — agreed on a four-point statement of principles, opposing:

A foreign policy that commits the US to disastrous foreign wars like the one in Iraq, which destroys lives and depletes our treasury;

The erosion of our constitutionally-protected civil liberties, including the Patriot Act, the approval of torture and the FISA bill;

The runaway growth of the national debt, which creates an intolerable burden for future generations; and

Corporate bailouts and the untrammeled power of the Federal Reserve system.

Dr. Paul in his presentation was gracious, modest, eminently reasonable. He deplored the “lesser of two evils” psychology which leads citizens to vote for people of whom they do not approve. He urged people not to waste their vote on politicians and policies in which they don’t believe. He also deplored the mainstream media and its obsession with “lipstickgate” and other nonsensical “issues.”

Then the candidates each got up to speak. Though they are united in their conviction that the system must be changed, each presented a different point-of-view. My candidate, Cynthia McKinney, reminded people of the Four Pillars of the Green Party: Peace, Social Justice, Ecological Wisdom and Grassroots Democracy. She remarked that when she left the Democratic Party, she “declared [her] independence” from an unjust system, a “politics of conformity and control.” She added that we engage in politics “so we can have power over public policy.” Politics is, after all, the “authoritative allocation of values in a society,” and that only a tiny minority of Americans now have their values affirmed in this society, wheras most of us have our values affirmed “practically none of the time.” She urged voters to “declare [their] independence” from the current system.

It must be said in truth that I disagree, and in some cases strongly disagree, with some of Ron Paul’s views. But I cannot help but admire his patriotism and integrity, as well as a virtue almost unheard of in politicians today: courage. Thank you, Dr. Paul!